High-skilled Migrants Research Articles

Exploring the Nexus between Highly-Skilled Migrants, the Kafala System, and Development in the UAE

This article explores the nexus between immigration of highly-skilled persons and economic growth in the Arab Gulf states, until now a significantly understudied topic. It is argued that long-term growth primarily stems from technological progress and the article conducts a qualitative analysis of the degree to which the group of highly skilled migrants contributes to technological progress. The paper focusses on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) but reflects general issues pertaining to the Arab Gulf states. It concludes that the policy framework that manages the migration system, the so-called Kafala (sponsorship) system, indeed has positive effects, namely that it ensures that all migrants are in employment and the skills of the migrants complement rather than overlap with the skills of the locals. However, asymmetric power balance between sponsor and migrant, the built-in inflexibility in relation to job mobility, and the lack of a broader sense of inclusion in the hosting country all diminish the contribution of the highly-skilled migrants to these economies. A culture of transience prevails which leads to short term thinking, less innovation and less likelihood of entrepreneurship. Finally, the article finds that due to demographic realities, lack of incentives for the migrants to pursue knowledge transfer and the general educational level in society, transfer of technology most likely takes place from one migrant to the next, thereby bypassing the local population.

Skill, Innovation and Wage Inequality: Can Immigrants Be the Trump Card?

With the ensuing immigration reform in the US, the paper shows that targeted skilled immigration into the RD (ii) for wage gap to decrease, RD (iii) even with two types of specific R&D inputs entering into the skilled and unskilled sectors separately, unskilled labor is not always benefited by high skilled migrants into R&D-sector. Rather, it depends on the importance of migrants' skill in R&D activities and intensity of inputs. Inclusive immigration policy requires inter-sectoral diffusion of ideas embedded in talented immigrants targeted for innovation. Empirical verification using a VAR regression model in the context of the USA confirms the conjectures, and the empirical results substantiates our policy-guided hypothesis that skilled immigration facilitates innovation with favorable impact on reducing wage-gap.

Schooling Forsaken: Education and Migration

We examine the phenomenon of forsaken schooling resulting from opportunities abroad. The brain-drain/gain literature takes as its starting point the migration of educated/professional labor from poor origin countries to richer host countries. While high-skilled migration is worrisome, many international migrants accept low-skilled positions in host countries. Their willingness to do so arises from very large host-home earnings differentials. At home this can lead to reduced educational investment as people forgo schooling because of opportunities to migrate to high paying low-skilled jobs. This suggests possible time-inconsistencies between short-run economic gains from migration and negative long-term effects from missing human-capital investment. We analyze data from Tajikistan, where approximately one-third of the labor force works outside of the country. We offer an explanation of our empirical results with a theoretical model, allowing us to establish the circumstances under which this type of forsaken schooling can occur and the trade-offs that policymakers' need consider.

Return, Circular, and Onward Migration Decisions in a Knowledge Society

This chapter provides a state-of-the-art literature review about research that aims to explain the return, repeat, circular and onward migration of the highly-skilled migrants around the world. After it describes the status quo in the knowledge economy and the international race for talent, it presents the relevant theories and concepts of migration in the social sciences and how these theories accommodate the phenomena of return, repeat and onward migration. A special section is devoted to selection. The chapter then summarizes, evaluates, and juxtaposes existing empirical evidence related to theoretical predictions. Observables such as education, income, gender and home country as well as unobservables such as ability, social capital and negotiating skills play a strong role in influencing return, repeat and onward migration decisions. Yet, there is no consensus on the direction of the effect. The chapter discusses shortcomings and limitations along with policy lessons. It concludes by highlighting holes in the literature and the need for better data.

High skilled migration through the lens of policy

Abstract High skilled migrants and the policies designed to attract and select such individuals are widely championed. In formulating and evaluating such policies, however, policy makers and academics alike face significant challenges, since, from the perspective of policy, what it means to be high skilled remains a fluid concept. The resulting ambiguity stymies meaningful international comparisons of the mobility of skills, undermines the design and evaluation of immigration policies and hinders the measurement of human capital. In this paper, we adopt an inductive approach to examine how high skilled migrants are classified based upon states’ unilateral immigration policies, thereby highlighting the difficulties of comparing high skilled policies across countries. We further elucidate the challenges in measuring the outcomes of high skilled migration policies that arise due to differing national priorities in recording high skilled migrants. We conclude by making a number of policy recommendations, which if enacted, would bring clarity to scholars and policy makers alike in terms of being able to meaningfully compare the composition, and assess the efficacy of, high skilled migration policies across countries. In doing so we introduce three datasets comprising: harmonised high skill migration flow data, skilled occupational concordances and high skilled unilateral and bilateral migration policy data, which undergird our analysis and that can be built upon in years to come.

Editorial Introduction: Migration in the Western Balkans – Trends and Challenges

ABSTRACTThis introductory paper sets the scene for the special issue on migration in the Western Balkan region. First, we briefly outline the background to the research networking initiative in the Western Balkans—‘WB-MIGNET’—which resulted in producing the set of papers presented here. Then we describe the context in which the analysis of migration, return and development in the Western Balkans takes place, highlighting the role of diasporas and return migration. The region exemplifies a wide range and interrelation of migratory forms, including temporary and permanent labour migration, forced migration of refugees, temporary displacement, high-skilled migration and transit migration. Quite apart from the scale and diversity of migratory phenomena in this region, the special relevance of the Western Balkans rests on mass emigration, predominantly of educated young people, and their possible return, including to post-conflict areas, and role in the development of their home countries. Such processes within the Western Balkans also offer useful lessons for designing future migration policies in Europe and worldwide. The final section of this introductory paper summarizes the papers that follow and highlights their originality and key findings.

Migration and FDI: The role of job skills

Using a multi-country gravity framework, this paper models and quantifies the relevance of migrants' job position in fostering Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). High-skilled migrants are defined as those individuals born in the investors' home/host country occupying managerial or professional positions in the host/home country of investment. Our estimates show that higher shares of migrants with management skills in a given country promote FDI into that country. In contrast, an increase in the share of migrants in non-qualified positions (regardless of their educational attainment) has a negative impact on FDI decisions. These findings highlight that the FDI-enhancing effect of migrants is related to a shift in their skill composition due to their occupation. We test our model on a new global panel data set of Greenfield bilateral investment with a wide variety of specifications, both at the extensive and intensive margins. Additionally, we provide new insights into the mechanisms by which migration influences FDI flows, with particular attention to the relevance of FDI level and activity.

The Dutch battle for highly skilled migrants: policy, implementation and the role of social networks

In recent years a growing competition for talent has emerged among developed nations. Policymakers across North-America, Australia and Europe have implemented targeted migration programs to attract global talent in order to gain the net positive effects associated with skilled migration. Research so far has mainly focused on analyzing such programs in traditional destinations for highly skilled migrants such as the United States, Canada and Australia. In this article we take the Netherlands as a case study of the more recent European involvement in the ‘race for talent’. We first describe how ‘highly skilled’ migrants are categorized in the various skilled migration schemes that exist in the Netherlands. Secondly, by using primary data on highly-skilled migrants who participated in one of these schemes we look at whether the policy measures attracted the intended target group. We conclude that policy measures that favor highly skilled migrants by themselves are not enough to attract talent. Having social capital in the Netherlands as well as the recruiting efforts of Dutch employers are more important in attracting highly skilled migrants. Also, being highly skilled does not necessarily mean that access to the Dutch labor market is without obstacles.

Highly Skilled or Highly Wanted Migrants? Conceptualizations, Policy Designs and Implementations of High-skilled Migration Policies

This special issue offers an opportunity to delve into the construction of migrant categories through policy design and policy implementation. It proposes to widen the focus beyond immigration authorities in order to include actors that are in one or another way involved in the process of selecting, supporting or employing highly skilled workers and therefore also contributing to their definition. The aim of the special issue is to bring to the surface the indistinct objectives of immigration policies, and to analyse the interplay between policies, discourses and practices. More precisely, we discuss the argument that the definition of highly skilled migrants depends more on how potential migrants are viewed by interest groups than on migrants’ characteristics.

Expatriates and the city: The spatialities of the high-skilled migrants’ transnational living in Moscow

The paper focuses on residential strategies and patterns of highly skilled migrants from Western countries in Moscow. During recent decades, transnational migration of highly skilled workers has grown and diversified; as a consequence, residential practices and socio-spatial behaviour of this kind of migrants (the so-called 'expatriates') in the destination city diversified as well. The spatial impact of highly skilled migrants on the destination city, however, is still rather underexplored (e.g., the analysis is limited to the upper strata of expatriates). The present paper fills this gap by focusing on the 'middling' group of highly skilled transnational migrants in Moscow. The research questions the view that expatriates tend towards socio-spatial clustering and homogenization, which are both commonly associated with the rise of transnational residential compounds. We argue that, on the contrary, the housing pattern of expatriates in Moscow has a multi-faceted spatial structure and is embedded in a heterolocal model of socio-spatial behaviour. The pulling factors of expatriate residential choices are similar to those choices of local people, while some elements—typically used to explain expatriate spatial preferences (e.g., localization of international schools or jobs)—are inconsequential. This dispersed and variegated settlement pattern seems to be linked to the 'middling' and increasingly heterogeneous nature of transnational migration and the cultural differences determining the host-home context divide.

Becoming ‘the Internationals’—how Place Shapes the Sense of Belonging and Group Formation of High-Skilled Migrants

Within the context of the transformation of work, mobility turns into a characteristic of contemporary (work-)lives and a pre-requisite for career biographies. High-skilled migrants who are employed in academia, IT or engineering increasingly incorporate the mobility demands of their ‘mobilised professions’. This paper examines how mobile professionals relate to their current place of residence, what kind of frictions they face and what forms of (alternative) belonging they develop in response. In doing so, the paper links ideas from governmentality studies with recent work from migration studies and the spatial sciences. Our analysis draws on interviews with high-skilled migrants in Manchester (UK). While broadly accepting the mobility demands of their respective fields of work without questioning, their resulting mobile practices often undermine the development of a sense of belonging based on place attachment and local social interaction. Our empirical material suggests that this potential conflict is mediated through the constitution of a group of ‘internationals’ who share mobile biographies and the experience of in-betweenness. Based on our findings, we suggest three directions for future research: to focus on the relational aspects of place ties, to investigate the role of the workplace and more specifically the employer, and to explore how places shape differential politics of belonging.

Assessing the other: a study on recruiting practices of high skilled ethnic minorities

Research on recruitment of ethnic minorities is often focused on discrimination and hinders for entering organizations. In contrast to existing literature, this study investigates an inclusive organization that recruits high skilled migrants and ethnic minorities. It focusses on actual recruitment practices using participant observations of employment interviews and assessment of candidates. We identify two key recruitment practices in the construction of acceptability: association and adequacy. These practices assess candidate in view of their similarity with existing employees (association) and in view of their adequacy with the position’s conditions (who will they be working with, what are the possibility of career). We show how association and adequacy are constructed around the ethnic background of the candidates, placing ethnicity in a central position in the construction of acceptability. Our results contribute to recruitment theory, by showing that acceptability is constructed the same way with all candidates (ethnic minority and/or migrants, or not) and that it is the ethnic order in place that leads to different assessment outcome: acceptable, or not. We introduce the concept of inclusive subordination to discuss the implications of our results for recruitment and policy makers.

Revisiting inequalities in the commuting burden: Institutional constraints and job-housing relationships in Beijing

Promoting social equality in transport has become a key concern in building inclusive cities. Inequities in the burden of commuting have attracted increasing attention from researchers. Although many studies have described the facts of transport inequality, there has been little in-depth research on institutional factors that influence commuting inequality. This paper aims to contribute fresh evidence on this topic by examining Beijing as a case study through a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The results of this analysis show that increasing inequality in the commuting burden largely results from existing institutional discrimination against migrants, especially highly-skilled migrants. Beijing's Danwei, Hukou and BGC systems, as well as the city's housing distribution system, create serious institutional barriers to maintaining Beijing's jobs-housing balance, causing extra commuting burdens for highly-skilled migrants. Surprisingly, low-skilled migrants are restricted less by institutional barriers and maintain a good job-housing relationship due to sufficient provisions of informal houses and jobs in a broad range of urban areas. Our study reveals a “back to Danwei house” movement through which local households negotiate the growing commuting burden with the pursuit of quality of life. Based on these findings, we argue that increasing social inequality in the commuting burden may continue to worsen unless institutional discrimination against disadvantaged groups is removed in the process of China's economic transition.

Brain Drain Phenomenon in Romania: What Comes in Line after Corruption?

Romanians’ rapidly increasing exodus over the borders, in the last years, propelled Romania to the top countries with the highest international migration rates worldwide. A rate of 7.3% per annum, recorded between 2000 and 2015, placed Romania second, after Syria (United Nations, 2016). Between 1990 – 2017, Romania registered the highest rise in the migration stock among all EU states – 287 per cent (The World Bank, 2018a). The boost of the migration phenomenon was supported by significant changes, including in the migrants’ profiles, in terms of their level of education, consequently the loss of human capital represented by the highly skilled Romanians already has an impact on the key sectors of the Romanian economy. The highly skilled manpower shortage has been a constant topic on the public agenda, especially after Romania’s integration in the European Union (2007), and after the burst of the most recent financial crisis (2008). The number of highly educated employees (tertiary education and upper secondary and post-secondary attainment) decreased in Romania, negatively affecting the key sectors of the economy. Furthermore, research shows that Romania has the lowest percentage of tertiary education graduates from the EU, with 26.3% for the age segment of 30 – 34 years (Eurostat, 2018a).
 The paper aims to show recent data on the determinant causes of the brain drain phenomenon in Romania (push factors) and to generate a classification of the three categories of mainly possible determinants: economic, socio-political and organizational factors, based on the results of an online survey addressed to Romanian high-skilled migrants.

Public beliefs in social mobility and high-skilled migration

This paper investigates how beliefs of the destination country’s population in social mobility may influence the location choice of high-skilled migrants. We pool macro data from the IAB brain-drain dataset with population survey data from the ISSP for the period 1987–2010 to identify the effect of public beliefs in social mobility on the share of high-skilled immigrants (stocks) in the main OECD immigration countries. The empirical results suggest that countries with higher “American Dream” beliefs, i.e., with stronger beliefs that climbing the social ladder can be realized by own hard work, attracted a higher proportion of high-skilled immigrants over time. This pattern even holds against the fact that existing social mobility in these countries is relatively lower.

Long-term relatedness between countries and international migrant selection

This paper studies the effect of the long-term relatedness between countries, measured by their genetic distance, on educational migrant selection. Analyzing bilateral migrant stocks of the 15 main destination countries and 85 sending countries for the year 2000, we find that migrant selection and genetic distance follow a nonlinear J-shaped pattern: at low levels of genetic distance, increases in genetic distance reduce the positive selection of migration. However, at higher levels of genetic distance, this pattern is reversed and migration becomes more positively selected. We complement this finding by showing that the net benefits of genetic distance are strongly decreasing for low-skilled migrants with increasing genetic distance, while high-skilled migrants are less responsive to genetic distance in general. Results are robust to conditioning on bilateral control variables, including various destination- and sending-country-specific fixed effects and applying an instrumental-variables approach that exploits exogenous variation in genetic distances in the year 1500.

High-skilled interregional migration and high-growth firms in Russia

ABSTRACTThis study identifies a non-linear and ‘U’-shaped relationship between interregional human capital mobility, measured using a data set on the mobility of university graduates from the top-100 Russian universities, and the presence high-growth firms (HGFs) in Russian regions. The initial rise in the number of HGFs is due to the relatively low concentration of highly skilled migrants and the confinement of innovation to a small number of firms. When the number of high-skilled migrants increases and a larger number of firms innovate, the competition effect strengthens which, in turn, leads to the decrease in a number of HGFs.

Using reflexivity to explain variations in migration among the highly-skilled

ABSTRACTMigration literature has traditionally distinguished between different motivations of migration, such as labour, family and newly also lifestyle migration, never fully exploring the background of these motivations. This article suggests that these different motivations may be explained by different modes of reflexivity as distinguished by Margaret Archer. Linking modes of reflexivity with migration motivations addresses two problems in current migration literature. First, it provides for practical application of reflexivity in explaining migration motivations, which has been missing so far. Second, the article advocates using psycho-social approach as opposed to more commonly adapted ethnical or class based explanations in understanding migration behavior, hence avoiding the potential trap of falling into the trap of methodological nationalism or classism. Through the interview with highly-skilled Estonian migrants it is shown that the reasons of migration among highly skilled are versatile and cannot be explained solely by their class background.

Effects of Information Channels across Skill and Product Quality Groups: Evidence from Trade-Migration Nexus

Immigrants can foster host-country trade flows by using their information network. However, the heterogeneity in skill level and increasing diversification in terms of both origin and destination of the immigrants have added complexity to this issue. This paper examines the causal linkage between immigrant driven ethnic networks and bilateral trade across different skill groups of immigrants and quality levels of products. I extend the Eaton-Kortum (2002) model for disaggregated product qualities and incorporates ethnic network in the model to establish the theoretical framework. Using a panel dataset of 19 high-income OECD countries and 99 low-income countries over the period of 1990-2005 and a newly available export quality index, I find that higher level of human capital provides high-skilled migrants with opportunities to work in high quality export oriented industries and trigger more high quality trade than the low-skilled migrants. Low-skilled migrants also use their home country knowledge to their advantage and penetrate the low quality export-oriented industry to trigger more of low quality trade compared to their counterpart. In addition, this paper demonstrates a positive indirect effect of secondary ethnic networks of third party nature on trade, with the effect stronger for low quality products and more so through low-skilled migrants.

Skill, Innovation and Wage Inequality: Can Immigrants Be the Trump Card?

With the ensuing immigration reform in the US, the paper shows that targeted skilled immigration into the RD (ii) for wage gap to decrease, RD (iii) even with two types of specific R&D inputs entering into the skilled and unskilled sectors separately, unskilled labor is not always benefited by high skilled migrants into R&D-sector. Rather, it depends on the importance of migrants’ skill in R&D activities and intensity of inputs. Inclusive immigration policy requires inter-sectoral diffusion of ideas embedded in talented immigrants targeted for innovation.